Lots of thoughts on this.

I enjoyed it. Stories with no plot and messy, flawed, unlikable yet somehow also likable characters are 100% my thing

I think what's holding me back from giving this my full endorsement is that there are several moments in the book that felt...idk too on the nose? And while the narrative or rather the narrator seems mostly self aware, some of these moments felt like they shifted away from that perspective a bit and took themselves a bit too seriously

I'm not quite sure yet if it was how these certain moments were executed or the actual content/events of the scene itself but I felt like I wasn't sure whether these moments were made intentionally unserious.

I mean the phrase "ok boomer" was dropped at one point earlier in the book in a sort of self flagellation inner thought which, aside from the curse of dating this book horribly once that phrase is out of the general population phrase bucket, seemed a rather unserious comment.

As for the...bigger epic events of the book, I also assume they aren't really meant to be taken too seriously given how unbothered the characters generally are about them especially by the end. It's all a manifestation of characters refusing to process their emotions blown up to its natural extreme. When your feelings seem so big that the literal world seems to be ending and all that.

I know I'm probably not expressing myself super well here and for that I apologize, but I do want to emphasize that there was a lot more that I liked about this book than anything I disliked.

It's clear Blake thought about these characters a lot and a great deal of time and attention went into them which is always going to aid a book in my eyes. These characters felt quite real to me and honestly I'd hope for nothing less after spending 500 pages with them and nearly no plot to speak of. It's clear Blake hedged her bets on making her characters engaging rather than crafting some big extravagant plot in hopes that the adrenaline high would distract readers from more forgettable characters like other authors sometimes do especially when magic/fantasy elements are involved.

Blake put her time and energy into the things that actually make a story worth reading and revisiting for me i.e. characters, relationships between characters, and story themes.

Overall, this was a pretty decent introduction to Blake's work despite the handful of awkward moments. I'll likely be picking up something else by her in the coming year.